In a Perfect World

herself, to retrieve the empty trash can. “Hello!” she called out to him. He turned and waited for her to reach him.

He wanted, as always, to talk about the flu: “Don’t kid yourself that the rats don’t have it. And the mice. Protect yourselves.”

Jiselle nodded. She said, “Well, we’re doing what we can.”

“What kind of traps do you have?” he asked.

“Live traps.”

Brad Schmidt shook his head, as though at very bad news or at foolishness so vast there could be no other response.

The exterminator thought it might be the unusually mild winter, the early spring and summer weather, that was causing all the trouble with the rodents—a complaint across the Midwest and the eastern states. By the last week of May, you couldn’t cross a room without having a mouse dash in front of you. Every morning, when Jiselle came into the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, something small and dark and alive would flee from her. She’d scream—a high, unfamiliar yelp that seemed to come straight out of her subconscious—heart pounding, all her senses jolted to high alert.

As with the birds, there was a barrage of public service announcements about the rodents. They were not carriers of Yersinia pestis, just as hemorrhagic zoonosis was not the bubonic plague. The stories of corpses found in abandoned buildings and in ditches gnawed to pieces by rats could certainly have been true, but this did not link any particular illness to the presence of rodents. Rats had always eaten dead bodies. The usual care was needed to keep rats and mice out of homes and businesses, but panic was unnecessary and unproductive, and even un-American. Some of the announcements on television showed a flag waving at full mast against a blue sky, while the voiceover cautioned the public against panic.

A decision to use poison or traps, the exterminator told Jiselle, would depend on whether or not anyone in the house would be willing and able to empty the traps—live or otherwise. The poison was slower, he said, and less predictable, but the mice would usually go elsewhere to die. You didn’t have to see them or dispose of them. The traps, however, required “cleaning” and maintenance. Clearly, he’d noticed the absence of a man in the house.

“I’ll take care of it!” Sam insisted. “I want to do it!”

“We’re not going to kill them, are we?” Sara called from her room.

Jiselle hadn’t realized Sara was listening to the exterminator talk to her and Sam at the kitchen table, but when Sara shuffled out wearing her black Saturday morning pajamas—already (or still) in her black makeup—it would have been impossible for the exterminator not to notice her resemblance to a rodent.

Sara said, “I’m not going to live here if we’re going to kill innocent creatures.”

Jiselle held up a hand to try to keep Sara from saying anything else, but it might also have looked as if she were waving goodbye.

The exterminator looked at Jiselle.

“Live traps?” she asked.

“I can do live traps if you can do live traps,” he said.

As it happened, Sam was perfectly happy to hear that the traps would fill up fast, that some of the mice might be diseased, or “biters,” and that he would have to wear mesh gloves so he could grab the ones that refused to vacate their cages. Over the next few weeks, like an apprentice exterminator, he took complete responsibility for the mice, for the cages and their maintenance, for the whole operation of trying to keep the mice from taking up permanent residence in the house, or taking it over. Jiselle would wait in the living room as Sam ran through the family room each morning and out the back door with a cage full of mewling and fur. He quit sharing the details with her—their numbers, the state of their health, their attitudes toward their captor—after the first tale of an albino mouse “the size of a baseball” that had bled from its nostrils and—“Stop,” Jiselle had said, trembling, placing her coffee spoon down on the kitchen counter.

“I’m sorry,” Sam said, looking apologetic but smiling at the same time.

“I hope you’re burning them,” Brad Schmidt said, and Jiselle decided there’d be no point in arguing with him about why she would have live traps if she was going to burn the mice, except to be sadistic.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said instead.

“Go ahead,” Brad Schmidt said.

“So. You were here when…?” Jiselle looked toward the road, unable to finish the question.

“When Mrs. Dorn was killed? Sure! We took care of those children until Mark got back.”

“Did she—how did it happen?”

“He never told you?” Brad Schmidt’s eyebrows shot up as if he’d caught someone in a fantastic crime.

“Well, he told me of course about the bus, but of course he doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“That little Sam,” Brad Schmidt said, “he tried to dash away from her, into the road; the bus had just started up, and she went after him.” He slammed his left fist then into his right hand to show the impact. “She was a saint, that woman. Not just because of that. Because of everything. If there was ever a mother who would have wanted to die taking care of her children, that was Joy Dorn. It’s the only comfort any of us can have.”

“Thank you,” Jiselle said, “for telling me.”

Before she went to pick up the children at school that day, Jiselle stood for a long time at the front door, looking out.

There, she thought, looking to the end of the driveway, is the place where Joy died.

There.

There was nothing there.

Why, she would ask Mark when he got back, hadn’t he told her that part of the story? The part of the story in which his first wife had run in front of a bus to save his son?

But would knowing have changed anything?

If not, why had he left the details so purposely…fuzzy?

Perhaps, Jiselle thought, she should try to call her therapist again. She’d left several messages in the last two months, but he hadn’t returned her calls. She turned from the front door and went to the telephone and dialed Smitty Smith’s number, which she knew by heart.

After several rings, a woman answered. “Yes,” she said when Jiselle asked if she’d reached Dr. Smith’s office.

“I’m calling to make an appointment,” she said.

“That’s too bad,” the woman said. Her voice sounded full of bitter irony. “He died three weeks ago.”

“What?”

“Dr. Smith died three weeks ago. This is his wife. I’m just here cleaning out the office. If you’d like a memento—say, a paperweight, or the Phoenix flu—I can send you something. But you won’t be having any more talks with Dr. Smith. I suggest you try solving your own problems for a change.”

Jiselle heard the woman laugh—loudly, unhappily, sounding nearly insane—before the line went dead, and then she stood looking at the phone in her hand for a long time before she put it back in the cradle.

Impossible.

There was some mistake.

Some sort of horrible joke was being made. She would try the number again in a few days.

Surely, if your therapist died—a therapist you’d seen regularly for over a decade—there would be some sort of official notice. A telegram? Perhaps no one would expect his patients to come to his funeral—after all, how many patients must Dr. Smith have had?—but surely, there would be something shared with her, expected of her. The man was the receptacle of her whole life. He could not simply have died.

Perhaps she’d dialed the wrong number, or his number had changed. Had he ever told her, anyway, that he